ffmpeg: updated to 3.4.2 and enabled 10bit H.264 decoder in libx264. Note that this package can not ENcode aac audio (although it can DEcode the AAC format just fine). Look here if you need a package with AAC encoder: https://slackware.nl/people/alien/restricted_slackbuilds/ffmpeg/

Also uploaded now: KDE 5_18.02 'testing' for Slackware -current, which is identical to KDE 5_18.02 but with support for Wayland enabled. Check the accompanying README.testing for details about the Wayland stack. Elaborate installation and upgrade instructions should be taken from the README in the 'latest' directory of the repository. Compared to KDE-5_18.02 'latest' there's 4 […]

a/btrfs-progs-v4.15.1-x86_64-1.txz: Upgraded. a/pkgtools-15.0-noarch-3.txz: Rebuilt. installpkg: support multiple threads for xz. Thanks to ivandi. Default threads for plzip is now equal to the number of CPU threads on the system rather than the number of physical cores. Default number of threads on xz is set to 2, to avoid a memory allocation problem when using too […]

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KDE3, KDE4 and Slackware 13.0

A bit of history… I realized that just a year ago, KDE 4.2.rc1 got added to Slackware’s “/testing” area.

With all the recent posts on this blog about KDE4 and me telling people how nice I think this version of KDE is, I realize that “liking” is a very personal expression of feelings. A feeling shared by many, fortunately, but there are still people who rather have the old KDE3 back, and the perceived stability that comes with it.

Those people should not read the next few paragraphs… instead do a fast-forward to the bottom half of this post 🙂

One of the reasons for the switch to KDE4 in Slackware 13.0 was that I did not want to build KDE3 packages for slackware64 during the time that I was “secretly” building the package set for it. I had been running KDE4 on my Slackware laptop for more than half a year when I kickstarted the 64-bit port in september 2008. Looking at my options for completing slackware64, I decided that I should jump straight to KDE4. It would probably take until somewhere in 2009 before the 64-bit port would be released to the general public. By that time, KDE 4.2 would be available which I thought would be the right time to replace KDE3 in Slackware.

In january 2009, Pat added KDE 4.2.0 to “/testing“, which was essentially a 32-bit “rebuild” of the KDE 4.2.0 packages the Slackware team members were already running on slackware64. Close inspection of the 32-bit KDE SlackBuild scripts would have revealed that something was cooking. The build scripts contained numerous hints to the non-public 64-bit port. By that time I think most of us were running slackware64 on a daily basis and were used to working with KDE4 (well perhaps this is not tru for Robby, our avid XFCE user ;-). The goal for going public with slackware64-current was set for may 2009. This meant that the package sets for 32-bit and 64-bit had to be synchronized before that time. The SlackBuild scripts for slackware64 were written with the philosophy that they should compile 32-bit packages just as easily, so this synchronization effort was not particularly hard, technically speaking… just a tedious administrative job (Pat might disagree here 🙂 The only big change of course, was that KDE4 had to move from “/testing” into the core “/slackware/kde” package directory.

KDE 4.2.1 was the actual version to finally replace KDE3 in Slackware. This was in march 2009, and got big publicity, because it was a revolutionary upgrade and therefore not welcomed by all Slackware users (but what major change is, really). The KDE team on the other hand, was quite pleased about this 😉

Note that I really like KDE4 – it has become so much more powerful a desktop than KDE3 ever was to me. There was just no way that we could keep everybody happy with the switch to KDE4. If Slackware 13.0 had shipped with KDE3, lots of people would have complained about “stale software”, since KDE3 was no longer maintained at that time (3.5.10 was the final release in the series). KDE 4.2.4 which did ship with Slackware 13.0, was good, with rough edges, but the best choice at that time. Since then, Vincent Batts has released a KDE 4.3.1 package set for Slackware 13.0: http://cardinal.lizella.net/~vbatts/kde/kde4-packages/4.3.1/ , slackware-current has moved to KDE 4.3.4 (stable and a joy to use) and my own packages for play-testing the KDE 4.4 prereleases (to be installed on slackware64-current) are mentioned in other blog posts of mine. KDE 4.4 is surrounded by some “political” issues involving the influence of certain big distros, which keep it from being included into Slackware in the near future. Perhaps I should talk about that in more detail, but I will spend another blog post on that.

However, many people have overlooked the fact that Pat actually did create a KDE 3.5.10 package set to accompany the Slackware 13.0 release. Its location is somewhat hidden and there was no publicity on the slackware.com web site. Mainly because KDE 3.5.10 for Slackware was released with status “unsupported“. It was meant as a service to the Slackware users who required more time to make the switch to KDE4.

[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by O. Morata, Eric Hameleers. Eric Hameleers said: KDE3, KDE4 and Slackware 13.0: A bit of history… I realized that just a year ago, KDE 4.2.rc1 got added to Slackwa… http://bit.ly/7P3NIE […]

Comment from GregPosted: January 26, 2010 at 15:02

“KDE 4.4 is surrounded by some “political” issues involving the influence of certain big distros, which keep it from being included into Slackware in the near future. Perhaps I should talk about that in more detail, but I will spend another blog post on that.”

That would be great. I am also wondering if KDE 4.4 includes knetworkmanager in kdelibs and how is Slackware gonna deal with that. AFAIK the lib should be able to use wicd as well (if not now at some later point). I stopped following upstream and i havent see any mention in this lately.

Knetworkmanager does not work in Slackware (since it needs networkmanager which we do not ship). A backend for wicd is not available yet, perhaps the developers will add one (there is a Slackware user in the wicd development team).

Eric

Comment from pprkutPosted: January 26, 2010 at 15:19

the wicd backend for solid is available since 4.3.x
I know that the network manager plasmoid was designed to work also with wicd, but don’t know exactly whether that version made it into 4.4

I know of a wicd backend for solid which is hosted at http://github.com/drf/wicd-solid – butt hat has not seen an update in 11 months.
The wicd support that was supposed to be added to knetworkmanager has not seen the light of day yet.

Fortunately, you’re not being forced to run KDE. Slackware includes another desktop environment (XFCE) and several other Window Managers (fluxbox, blackbox, windowmaker, fvwm2).

Comment from gargamelPosted: January 26, 2010 at 21:30

I’d be really very interested to know the politicial issues “surrounding KDE 4.4”, and how other distros can prevent something (anything!) from being included in Slackware. If it’s policykit and PAM, then I guess, the large user base and the “enterprise users” of these other distros have identified a demand for it. Then the question would be, why Slackware users should not benefit from these developments, as well. But I am not supporting the inclusion of bloat, here, of course. More information would be helpful.

My only real worry is, what this means for the future of Slackware and KDE. Because 4.3.4 may not be continued and supported forever, as good as it is (I like it very much, I don’t have *any* issues with it).

Sooner or later the decision may be have to be made, to either upgrade to KDE 4.4 (or greater) or to drop KDE support in Slackware completely. I’d rather not see option 2 become a necessity….

My remark about “politics” was indeed referring to the fact that KDE 4.4 loses functionality if it is compiled while PolicyKit is not present on the system. This is questionable, since KDE4 should be using kauth as an abstraction instead, but as it stands, kauth integration will not be ready until KDE 4.5.
In the meantime some of KDE 4.4’s components “need” PolicyKit and there is no way around it, thanks to hard-headed developers.

The whole issue with PolicyKit, and more generally the whole set of “*Kit” libraries is that not only are they pushed into Linux by the big distros while at the same time dropping support for HAL, but support for the generic UNIX authentication backend “shadow utils” is ignored in favour of PAM. This is understandable if you consider that the other popular Linux distros are all using PAM. However, if we look upon X.Org and KDE as an Operating System’s core components, then these should not be intimately tied to Linux. Instead, their developers should strive to keep their code applicable to a wider range of OS’es.
Creating a dependency on PolicyKit (which is the work of a single Redhat employee and which is unstable as hell), and DeviceKit which was written by the former HAL developer after he left the HAL code to rot, is a very bad decision in my view.

Yes, it is the issue of the big players defining the rules of the playground, and many other developers (have to) follow suit (X.Org will drop support for HAL in their future releases).

It’s not just the big distros of course. Look at the devastating entanglement of kernel, mesa, X.Org and Intel developers, who managed to keep X.Org in a pretty useless state for more than a year.

I do think that Free Software is being hi-jacked for the sake of the Big Bucks. It used to be just the Big Egos and I could live with that. Nowadays, we are being pushed in all directions, and I am speaking of Slackware of course. It is a miracle that Pat manages to maintain a stable and useable distro at all! Even with a team of helpers, Pat is the one who defines Slackware and makes it stand out in the crowd of distros that strive to look alike even if they do not admit it.

End rant. I need another Trappist now.

Eric

Note: I never stated that Slackware will not add KDE 4.4 because of these issues. I merely said that this will not happen in the immediate future. We are working with developers to get our shadow utils supported in polkit which is one way to take away the pain. Another alternative is to take the loss and add KDE 4.4 with reduced fuctionality. Look at my KDE 4.4 prerelease packages… they still offer a great desktop environment!

Comment from giovanniPosted: January 27, 2010 at 00:35

i think that if one day Slackware make less of kde…it will not be a problem, there’s Xfce that’s a great Desktop or Lxde or many others more fast and with great usability and safe!
i use Xfce and on old computers Kde3, that’s better than kde4 ( only my opinion….), but according to me, the Desktop Environment is the last of problems, more important thing is that Slackware remains true to itself and its tradition!
Good Luck and Good Job!!!

Comment from gargamelPosted: January 27, 2010 at 01:27

Thanks for the detailed background info, Eric!
I have no doubt, that everything you say is true, but I wonder how it is possible, that the developers of the other distros don’t notice and acknowledge these problems. They have a large user base, and are well accepted in enterprises of arbitrary sizes. It is surprising for me, that they not only accept, but apparently *demand* such immature components to be included in their distros.

What surprises me, too, is the drop of support for HAL. I wonder, why. It is working so well, here, and teams up nicely with udev. I don’t see a real reason to replace it. Instead I’d recommend every other distro to integrate it as smoothly as you managed to do it for Slackware.

Another suprise is kauth. Is it really necessary to have yet another layer of abstraction, that works only with one DE? Shouldn’t there be a simple standard, that could easily be adopted by all distros, independent of the WM or DE? I mean, we are talking about user authorisation, right? Why should this differ significantly between environments? Why can’t there finally be a concept and an implementation that would work in Gnome, KDE, XFCE and the *boxen, finally?

Only hope for now is, that over time polkit etc. will mature, it seesm.

gargamel

Comment from GunnarPosted: January 27, 2010 at 12:08

Thanks for sharing the insight on the challenges around KDE 4.4 politics. Usuful but sad reading about the state of open source.

Comment from pprkutPosted: January 27, 2010 at 12:48

The necessity for kauth might not be immediatly visible if you see KDE as a unix desktop. However, if you take their efforts to port it to Mac and Windows into account, it becomes apparent that the “standard unix authentication” method doesn’t really help there.
This leaves the comment that we loose functionality on Linux just because the kde developers strive for a Windows version. But that is not true either. A properly designed kauth system would allow all those enterprise distributions to use whatever pain in the ass they want to use, while Slackware would still be able to use the standard unix tools. Unfortunately kauth is currently far away from “properly designed” and support for the standard unix tools seems unlikely to happen soon. Let’s see what 4.5 brings.

thanks for share…good info but sad on the truth. just wanna say, are we going to far from the start point or we just wandering around without direction…? are we still can have the joy and enjoy the opensource? yes your shares here guys, gives me little chills…

Thank You and the Slackware Team, for all your hard work to push Slackware forward. I Like it. Running Slackware64 mit KDE 4 on my System.

Jeffrey

Comment from Aaron SeigoPosted: February 9, 2010 at 18:27

“My remark about “politics” was indeed referring to the fact that KDE 4.4 loses functionality if it is compiled while PolicyKit is not present on the system. This is questionable, since KDE4 should be using kauth as an abstraction instead, but as it stands, kauth integration will not be ready until KDE 4.5.”

this has zero to do with politics and everything to do with providing needed functionality.

with KDE 4 we decided to side with a policy of not running GUIs as root. this was not an easy decision since it meant a lot of work for us.

probably unsurprising to everyone here who knows anything about security, there aren’t many people who are willing to roll up their sleeves and get to this kind of work and have the skill to do so.

KDE does not dictate to the operating system vendors, be they Slackware, Red Hat, Novell, Mandriva, FreeBSD, Apple, Microsoft or whomever what is on the system. ergo we create abstraction layers where necessary. this is not the most efficient system for us either as we are sometimes left in “adapt-at-a-scramble” mode ourselves as the OSVs shift and turn with very little upstrea coordination. but we manage.

in this case, PolicyKit is providing features and functionality that several of the mainstream distributions have decided is worth supporting. it happens to also support the kind of fine-grained control we’d like to see. the world isn’t full of roses, though: during development of 4.4 PolicyKit had a major change in API and a new release and we had to adapt.

KAuth itself is able to have different backends. this is actually shown quite clearly as it supports either version of PolicyKit. it could also support non-PolicyKit solutions. we have limited manpower, however, and this stuff takes time.

i think you have confused a situation driven by simple pragmatism within our logistical limitations with a political one.

what would be great is instead of people inventing stories about “politics getting in the way of things” is to highlight the need for additional work in the backends for KAuth. that way instead of fomenting more arguing and gnashing of teeth, maybe someone who is reading your blog would get inspired and find the motivation to spend some spare time working on KAuth so that it can use some other system, e.g. PAM, as a backend option.

i know the developer who works on KAuth personally, and he’s generally very open to input and involvement. i know that we (in KDE) would love to expand the support within our various abstraction layers that we must keep up (though we keep those to an absolute minimum; we have no love of wheel reinvention) so that they are more broadly useful.

would you care to write a blog entry to your audience about the issue with the hopes of us finding a solution together in the form of a pair of motivated hands?

Comment from SomeoldmanPosted: February 11, 2010 at 04:52

Comment from Aaron Seigo

“this has zero to do with politics”
– It does have to do with politics, when there are *many* users who do not want or need Pam, or Policykit and the KDE developer’s are not sensitive to these user’s needs, wants, or wishes. You think they would have learned when GNOME pulled this trick years ago. KDE appears to be taking a “it’s our way, or the highway” approach. And the push for these technologies are by Corporations, *not* the users, or input from other distro’s

“and everything to do with providing needed functionality”
– What functionality? Play a cd, surf the web, check my battery status, hibernate, type a letter? Fluxbox can handle those items, no pam, or policykit required.

“with KDE 4 we decided to side with a policy of not running GUIs as root”
– Yes we just have Fedora shipping policykit that let’s users install applications un-beknownst to the admin of the box as a result of cryptic command/configuration’s embedded in xml files and the like. Good job /end-rolls-eyes.

“PolicyKit is providing features and functionality that several of the mainstream distributions have decided is worth supporting.”
– While they have a choice to change source code, I truly doubt you’d see any distro reverse engineering KDE to yank the Policykit. KDE is forcing it on them, and they ship it.

“i think you have confused a situation driven by simple pragmatism within our logistical limitations with a political one”
– He made sense to me. KDE’s getting over-engineerd by Corporations who could care less how easy/hard it is to build/maintain a distro as a user thereby forcing people to buy support contracts. Plus, these technologies are *new* and *changing*. Why would you blame anyone for not wanting to run *ALPHAware’s*. If Redhat wants policykit, then KDE should add a path/extension so that Redhat can have their playtoy’s. KDE shouldn’t be using these playtoys as a default and cow-tailing to just one distro.

Comment from Aaron SeigoPosted: February 12, 2010 at 23:43

“It does have to do with politics”

it was not a decision made for or under the influence of political reasons, it was a decision made for purely technical reasons.

“KDE developer’s are not sensitive to these user’s needs, wants, or wishes”

KAuth significantly improves things for many of our users, and it sets the stage for doing the same for the rest. until we had KAuth, we had some unresolvable issues.

note that you can build KDE without polkit, and there are people on Slackware using KDE with polkit. nobody is frozen out.

” KDE appears to be taking a “it’s our way, or the highway” approach”

i can understand that that is your interpretation of it, but what we actually have done is invest a large amount of effort to produce something (KAuth) that can work everywhere.

we don’t have infinite resources, so the time that was available was focused on addressing the needs of the greatest number of our users first. this is not the same as excluding others, as other use cases will be covered in time.

“And the push for these technologies are by Corporations, *not* the users, or input from other distro’s”

KAuth was done 100% by volunteers unaffiliated with any corporation or distribution behind PolicyKit. moreover, KAuth is not welded to PolicyKit, it’s simply the first backend that was written for KAuth.

‘“and everything to do with providing needed functionality”
– What functionality?’

the ability to run actions with elevated security privileges in a way that is both safe and can be configured.

KDE4 doesn’t require Polkit for any of those things either. just because Slackware devs have decided not to package KDE SC 4.4 does not make that less true.

“Yes we just have Fedora shipping policykit that let’s users install applications un-beknownst to the admin of the box as a result of cryptic command/configuration’s embedded in xml files and the like.”

which has nothing to do with KDE, KAuth or even PolicyKit itself. i’m not sure if i’m deaing with someone who is open to reason at this point or who is just ranting. :/

” I truly doubt you’d see any distro reverse engineering KDE to yank the Policykit”

there is no reverse engineering needed. KAuth is a well documented API with a separation between the front end and the back end. writing a different KAuth backend is all that is needed. we’ve already written 4 of them (Fake, MacOs and ones for 2 different versions of polkit)

“KDE is forcing it on them, and they ship it.”

nobody is forced to do anything, and anyone can add a new backend to KAuth. we’d welcome it upstream, even.

the way that new platform integration APIs tend to happen, though, is that the front end API (KAuth) is written, backends that will cover the most people as possible are written with others being prioritized according to time available.

which is to say, that not having 100% coverage of all possible platforms on day 0 is not uncommon.

and truthfully, in this case, Slackware could ship with KAuth using the “Fake” KAuth backend and it would be like 4.3 without KAuth.

“If Redhat wants policykit, then KDE should add a path/extension so that Redhat can have their playtoy’s.”

we have: KAuth’s backends are EXACTLY this.

“KDE shouldn’t be using these playtoys as a default and cow-tailing to just one distro.”

we aren’t. we have provided KAuth with lets us back-end onto an authentication system. we support more than one already, and others can rather easily be added. in fact, that is precisely what we want to see happen.

it is evident to me that your concerns have arisen from not really understanding the technology very well at all in this case. that is understandable, i’m sure you’re just looking in from the sidelines of development as a user and are understandably concerned. but your information is incorrect and is leading you to conclusions that bear no resemblance to the realities of the situation. i do hope that we can manage to correct that through discussions such as these.

Comment from pprkutPosted: February 13, 2010 at 12:45

My personal opinion is, that kauth itself is not really the problem here. Quite the contrary, I think kauth is a good piece of software. I was missing a sort of “root-mode” in the kde sc ever since the switch from kde3 and I’m very happy that this is now taken care of, at least at the foundation level. It might not be perfect yet, as it is the first public release, but that was the case with other components as well. In the early kde4 days there was only one network management backend for solid as well and that was for network-manager, which doesn’t have a very good reputation amongst Slackware users either. With 4.3 we got a wicd backend and as far as I can tell it works
quite good and I’m pretty sure a lot of Slackware users appreciate that (I do). What’s probably worth pointing out here is that the developer of the wicd backend is the same as the developer behind kauth.
So with 4.4 the only sensible backend for kauth is polkit. There’s policykit as well, as you mentioned, but that isn’t really an option as it is already unmaintained/abandoned/deprecated/whatever. And here’s the point, this is not really a problem either. Kde chose what looked best for them, and they couldn’t have done better imho. The unfortunate thing for us Slackware users is, that the only sensible backend option for kauth is *unstable* software, a moving target. This is as far as I know unprecedented and what I think our community dislikes the most (pure personal opinion). Then there’s also the dependency of polkit on PAM, which doesn’t help there either. PAM has always been a very controversial topic amongst Slackware users, and it will stay that way for some time. Now I know that at least that is being worked on, which is already a good point, though it’s a bit unfortunate that a small distribution like Slackware has to go through the trouble of pushing support for standard unix tools into those frameworks (polkit, consolekit,…) while the big players just don’t care (that’s where the political issue stems from I guess). Now I know that kde has very little influence there, and I understand that from your perspective there wasn’t really an alternative that would have worked better, but the point remains.
That leaves us with the point of writing a backend for kauth that is supported by Slackware (so far I could only think of su or sudo, which probably don’t fit that well there). Unfortunately this doesn’t work either since there are some components in 4.4 that directly depend on polkit, bypassing kauth (the font installer comes to mind here, and I think the printer applet was mentioned as well somewhere, though I cannot remember where). So we would loose functionality even by selecting the fake backend. Taking care of that before the release would have been nice (maybe it can be done for 4.4.1? I don’t know if this would fit the description of fixing a bug). Only if those issues are fixed, writing a new backend would become a viable option.

Comment from andrewPosted: February 14, 2010 at 03:42

Aaron,
Sometimes you get very defensive about KDE – and it’s your right to do so. However, other times I think you miss the big picture as a result. Currently, the KDE team is making it a /challenge/ to use a full KDE environment. “Migrate to the unstable software, or miss out on features” is such a terrible situation. If the kauth stuff is so fragile and new, items in 4.4 should not blatantly depend on them. I know that I can use 4.4 without policykit, (polkit?), and pam, but you must see what a slippery slope this is.

Comment from someoldmanPosted: February 15, 2010 at 06:02

Comment from Aaron Seigo
“note that you can build KDE without polkit, and there are people on Slackware using KDE with polkit. nobody is frozen out.”

No we’ll just lose functionality as it appears on the roadmaps that I’ve read. It sounds like you’re saying it’ll be possible, but from what I’ve read that doesn’t appear to be the case, I hope you’re right.

—————————
Commant from Someoldman “And the push for these technologies are by Corporations, *not* the users, or input from other distro’s”
Comment from Aaron Seigo “KAuth was done 100% by volunteers unaffiliated with…”

and

Comment from Aaron Seigo “it is evident to me that your concerns have arisen from not really understanding the technology”

No I understand policykit, pam, $kit, quite well, after all they are requirements now for a full installation of gnome, which has historically been my preferred desktop (but not anymore due to their hard coded requirements of policykit, etc).
I have built my own gnome from the ground up for a few years, and reworked all of Slackware to use them.

So I know what it means to add these items to a gnu/linux installation, and I can tell you, this is not like asking distributions to include some new ‘library’.

“Traditionally UNIX-like operating systems have a clear distinction between ordinary unprivileged users and the almight and powerful super user ‘root’. However, in order for a user to access and configure hardware additional privileges and rights are needed. Hitherto, this have been done in a number of often OS-specific ways. For example, Red Hat based systems usually grant access to devices to a user if, and only if, the user is logged in at a local console. In contrast, Debian-based systems often relies on group membership, e.g. users in the ‘cdrom’ group can access optical drives, users in the ‘plugdev’ group can mount removable media and so on. ”

And this part is the crux of the matter:

“For example, Red Hat based systems usually grant access to devices to a user if, and only if, the user is logged in at a local console. In contrast, Debian-based systems often relies on group membership”

There you have it. Since Red Hat doesn’t like traditional *nix ways of doing things they made up their own.

The reason this concerns me Aaron is, even though I have no intention of using KDE4 on my Slackware boxe’s, or for others is I’m stuck having that *cancer* of authentication schema onboard my computer. Becuase many other items have to be re-worked (after hours of testing) to get them to work, but are still needed even if KDE isn’t on board. Cracklib, shadow, samba, I could go on all day as to what this requires Slackware dev’s todo. This isn’t a lib. (side note, the reason I don’t use KDE on my computers is KDE’s security updates policy, but that’s a rant for another day 🙂

—————————————————————————————
Commant from Someoldman “Yes we just have Fedora shipping policykit that let’s users install applications un-beknownst to the admin of the box as a result of cryptic command/configuration’s embedded in xml files and the like.”

Comment from Aaron Seigo “which has nothing to do with KDE, KAuth or even PolicyKit itself. i’m not sure if i’m deaing with someone who is open to reason at this point or who is just ranting. :/”

My point to that was, it’s *another* thing that administrator’s have to micro-manage xml/config files to ensure that the box is setup to how *they* want it, and not predetermined by some dev somewhere.

—————————————————————————————

Comment from Aaron Seigo “i’m sure you’re just looking in from the sidelines of development as a user and are understandably concerned. but your information is incorrect and is leading you to conclusions that bear no resemblance to the realities of the situation. i do hope that we can manage to correct that through discussions such as these.”

It’s OK to flame me, you don’t have to be so nice 🙂 But really I’ve run KDE4 on Slackware –current, and it’s done! It’s a good desktop, stop adding things now ! 😀 . My advice, fix the bugs, fix the desktop icons always moving (firefox download to desktop blows out their arrangement – even kde3.5 series), and fix klipper not honoring xterm copy/paste. Get Koffice working, because the FUD in my brain says openoffice won’t be free for very long (koffice in 3.5 was sweet). And please please get a MSAccess 95′-ish database functionality with all the wizards, and understands click events to perform sql like querie’s and you’d have a winner. Free software (openoffice included) has nothing to offer small business that is on par/equivelant to MS Access 95 ( I’d ask for office 2003, but that’s a tall order).

Comment from oneforallPosted: March 22, 2010 at 05:21

Aaron Seigo
The fact is that you released it as known to be broken. I do know its because of udev going to be with out hal and replaced with the known buggy and guaranteed to brake all apps/libs Polkit-1. “Pokit/Pam with or with out Pam its the same”. How, the fact that like Pam everything has to be built with it (Polkit-1) . But back to KDE being released broken, as in things that USED to work but break if we don’t use Polkit-1. There is nothing hard to understand about how wrong that was and the proof that linux as a whole now has lost respect for all platforms. Its proving that linux now isn’t what I thought years ago to work with all platforms. It now shows how it only wants to work with the selected favorites(The bigger platforms )”oh the feel of commercialism”. It now has the WHOLE commercial attitude. I and any one else that was in #kde, #Policykit-kde, bug page etc seen wontfix,closed use Pam , Slackware(even though I never said what distro and still don’t because its not just Slackware) “eventually will be forced to use Polkit/Pam” and many more ignorant replies. Then later this kauth was added but still it was broken and still released . It show a clear disrepect for the lower number of platforms. Its the fact that these should have been thought out like all the other years but since the lack of respect now it doesn’t surprise me at all. But as far as I know udev isn’t officially released requiring polkit-1 , but kde is . I also hate the fact that with the patch its still puts that as some one said cancer on my and others system. So everything still has to work threw it and not TOTALLY with out it (PAM and POLKIT). “repeating hear since you fail to remember THIS IS TO HAVE THE FULL FUCTIONS WE HAD” not dropping them with this lame excuse that we can run KDE with out polkit/Pam but loose those fuctions. It’s once again you could have still made it work as always and provide them that are stupid enough to use polkit/Pam that ability.
But as the commercial attitude, screw those fewer people even though they would repect us( as in we never say keep what we like and lose that other crap) . we don’t care. I hated udev but this fuels my hatred of it even more.
Anyway it became a huge disappointment. I really wish we didn’t have to use polkit-1 at all . I have no doubt the problems KDE had we from all the major platforns that use pam/polkit and the rest have to suffer too . guess the old saying of all good things must come to an end are fitting hear :(. patch or not I have cancer now. Plus no its not paranoia , its a fact that Polkit/Pam are well know for all the bugs and will cause all the app/libs to break. Too well know. I hate it too because it has linux following the path of m$ with Office97, IE, Directx . The security should not be something everything has to be built around and more that the security on your house. It should work for you. Its as stupid as the system loosing functionality because you took out the browser. The authentication should be like all apps separate not embedded “so to speak” . This is to allow for other to make new ones. But this way then theirs would still be owned by Polkit-1(2 what ever) . Its insane .

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Kauth seems to have got more polkit centric and not improved. I came across this looking for how to build xfce without polkit. Currently I simply remove it’s suid bit.
If Redhat used console access as it’s security mechanism I’m glad I never decided on using centos.
This is yet another example of just how foolish “Enterprise” (Think Exchange, IIS) can be. I think Red Hat must hire on qualifications and less so on experience and this can be disastrous when coupled with Red Hats free reign policy. A clear mis understanding of Unix security has been demonstrated.

All that wasted development that could have been put into small useful tools or contributing to other projects simply causing problems when sudo can do everything polkit can more securely, more functionally and more specifically and keeping devs used to sharing code and using tailored priviledge seperation.